Lenovo supports DreamWorks Animation with powerful workstations, water cooled servers, and flexible IT services, enabling hundreds of artists and engineers to efficiently complete their demanding animation projects.
At DreamWorks Animation, an average of 400 to 600 artists and engineers collaborate on a single CG animation film. A production typically takes three to four years and requires hundreds of thousands of rendering hours. The right IT infrastructure is essential to ensure this creative and technical process runs smoothly.
Lenovo supports DreamWorks as their preferred technology provider through a close partnership that includes workstations, data center infrastructure, and managed services. What does this mean in practice?
Workstations
DreamWorks uses Lenovo workstations in every phase of the animation pipeline. From lighting and surfacing to visual effects (FX): models like the ThinkStation P620 and P8 are deployed across all departments. Lenovo designed these systems to perform under heavy, computationally intensive workflows. Stability and speed are central to the design process, allowing artists to work without interruption on their iterative creative processes.
The majority of DreamWorks employees currently work with Lenovo hardware, with the goal of expanding this usage throughout the entire organization.
Water cooling in the data center
An animation film requires not only powerful desktops but also an advanced server infrastructure. For this, DreamWorks uses Lenovo ThinkSystem servers that utilize Neptune Direct-to-Node warm water cooling. This technology offers a cost-effective solution to modernize DreamWorks’ 25-year-old data center without expanding its physical footprint.
Thanks to water cooling, DreamWorks Animation can significantly increase the capacity and energy efficiency of the data center.
Thanks to water cooling, DreamWorks Animation can significantly increase the capacity and energy efficiency of the data center. This has a direct impact on both business costs and creative space for artists.
Scalability via TruScale
DreamWorks’ needs evolve over time. To remain flexible, the animation studio relies on Lenovo TruScale. TruScale is a service model where Lenovo offers infrastructure as-a-service. The customer pays for actual usage, measured based on power consumption. Lenovo determines the exact hardware needed together with DreamWorks.
With TruScale, the studio maintains the control and security of on-premises systems while still benefiting from scalable resources, 24/7 monitoring, and managed support. TruScale is used for compute-intensive workloads that form the core of animation production.
Infrastructure management is handled through Lenovo’s XClarity One and Confluent, among others. Although DreamWorks primarily works on-premises, cloud technology is used to a limited extent, mainly to provide additional computing power for rendering tasks (bursting).
Partnerships
The collaboration between Lenovo and DreamWorks goes beyond traditional hardware delivery. Both parties regularly align on new and existing solutions to continuously improve DreamWorks’ technological support.
Lenovo is not DreamWorks’ only partner. For storage infrastructure, the studio collaborates with NetApp, for example. For streamlining production processes through user interfaces, there is a partnership with Amdocs.
DreamWorks’ technological needs evolve with the increasing complexity of animation films. Visual quality and storylines are becoming increasingly ambitious, requiring an IT infrastructure that is scalable, powerful, and reliable. DreamWorks Animation relies on its partnership with Lenovo to provide the necessary tools and support to realize its creative ambitions.
This case study was created in collaboration with ITdaily partner Lenovo.